For the past several months I have been spammed by a variety of authors who have been at best indiscriminate and at worst offensive spam. Most of them are using lists of top Amazon reviewers that are being indiscriminately and probably illegally circulated by book clubs as well as spammer networks.
On further investigation I have found that an spam and variation of the Nigerian fraud industry has been built up within Amazon, especially Kindle but less so and also CreateSpace.
AMAZON DOES NOT CARE.
Repeated reports to Amazon have failed to elicit a response. What is happening is that a legion of spam authors, many based in Pakistan and India, are creating Kindle titles with hot words like “make money” or “weight loss” and then they are spamming the world to try to sell the book via kindle, starting with the unfortunately top reviewers. My examination of several of these titles show ingenious crap. Cleverly package, not worth the time to order and certainly not worth any money.
AMAZON DOES NOT CARE.
There appears to be zero interst at Amazon about the abuse of its top reviewers. There appears to be zero interest about Amazon about Kindle now being a variation of a Nigerian fraud factory. Indeed, Amazon, for all its vaunted cloud and other technical expertise, does not appear to have the brains to use data mining and filtering to rapidly identify and block spam products from being loaded and then marketed with spam reviews.
I am offering this story to WIRED but urge one and all to mobilize eyeballs. I believe that the basic cultural problem is that Bezos does not actually value knowledge — he is in the business of selling “packages” and his lack of focus on quality control on the easiest packages to “fake” is now creating a very ugly underbelly for the Amazon enterprise.
